cl0scly linked. Interr0gation abounds. He is nn apostle; a free nposlle; au npostlo "·ho saw not Christ in his humiliation, and never knew him after the flesh, but has seen him in his glorification, and dates his conversion from the spectacle of his Divine exaltation; and, last of all, an apostle whose success among the Corinthians (" my work in the Lord; " "the seal or mine apostleship") hns vindicated and verified his claims as Christ's chosen servant. Self-assertion becomes under some circumstances a Ycry important dnty, and, if self be surrendered to God, there is no way more effective to exemplify humility. One who can ascend to a height so loftv, and stand amona the sublimities of the universe apart from self and even dead to self, is·a far greater man i~ the moral scale than one 1vho, on the low plain of this worlrl, merely foregoes his selfishness anrl nets rlisinterestcdly to comply with an earthly contingency. Full of the infinite and eternal, St. Paul's thoughts are God's thoughts finding tone and accent in his utterance. There is no faltering, no nice qualifyings, no hesitating apprehension lest self should insinuate its pretensions. Bnt the view gh·en of himself is large, massive, anrl, for its purpo,e, strikingly complete. Men C.'\nnot speak of themselves in such a strain unless an utter self-forgetfulness be precedent. A thinker's illustrations show what hold a thought has on him. In this instance St. Paul's illustrations are significallt as well as dirnrsificd. Soldiers in the field, husbandmen in the villeyard, shepherds with their flocks, supply his imagillation with analogies to establish the right claimed by himself "to cat and to drillk," "to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles," and" to forbear working." On all grouuds, uaturai an,i civil and religious, he maintains the right, and then advances to Old Testament authority. "Doth God take care for oxell?" Yea, not only for their sakes as a.nimals, but for man's benefit, tho providence over the lower creation being tributary to the providence that looks to man's welfare as the final earthly cause of all arrangements in the kingdom of nature, Yea, verily, we are in the song of the bird and the muscle of the horse and the fidelity of all domesticated creatures, as surely as in the grass and the cereals and the luscious fruits of the ground. Most true it is that~ "llfore servants wait on man Than he'll take notice of; in every path He treads down that which doth befriend him When sickness makes him pale and wan. Oh, mighty love I llfon is one world, and bath Another to attend him." The prefigurations and the wondrous homologies are all from below, so that whatever may be found by industry, by science and art, iu the amplitude and beneficence of material things and of animal existence, are but so many prophecies of mall's natural position of headship. Yet what incompleteness were ill all this, and what a mockery of mall's exaltation, if it were all !-a vast pyramid enclosing a mummy-a magnificent temple, like the heathen temples, in which you walk through portico and corridor and l1all to confront at last a worthless image in stone. 'l'o perfect this idea of man sharlowed forth beneath him and ever advancing towards him, there must be a cou.nter- part. The counterpart is the archetype above. It descends to mall in Christ-Sou of man because Son of God. "For our sakes, no doubt, this is written;" and all the writincrs, below and above, on the earth's strata, in the Holy Scriptures, arc alike in this: "for /:i,r sakes." It is all a unity or it is all nothing. And this power of manhood St. Paul declares to belong to him, and vested to the full in his apostleship. If, now, St. Paul had exhorted the Corinthians so urgently to obey the dictates of conscience in a matter clcarlv harmless, and thu~ avoid a wrong to the weaker brethren and a wrong to their own so"uls; and if he had avowed his own inflexible resolution to" eat no flesh" (the me:it of which he had been speaking) "for ever;" it was a fit occasion to testify to his own self-denial for the sake of the gospel. 'l'he solace of domestic life, tho special tenrlerncss of close sympathy, the offices of watchful affection, ministerial sup- port, "carnal things" that might have lightened the bnnlcn of poverty alld made his toil much casier,-these were cheerfully resigned. Others allowed themselves these airls and comforts; he refused them, one and all. From the common order of apostolic life he would 8tall<l aside in his own isolated lot, an<l "1ny gospel" should have in his own career the most forcible demonstration of his glorious individuality. And then, recollecting the law of the temple service which provided for the support of the pries,s, en. rx. 1-27.J THE FIHST EPISTLE TO TUE COil.I~THLA~:3. 297
he would strengthen the analogical argument already presented in favour of his ri<rhts. At every touch the individual portrait of the community and race-man glows ~ore ,·ividly on the canvas. The contrast had cost him much. Poverty, loneliness, sorrow, had been intensified, but there it was-a contrast with the soldier, the husbandrnan, tho shepherd, the priest, the apostles-self-assumed and a. perpetua.: obligation-" lest we should hinder the gospel of Christ."-L.